The present application relates generally to online social network services, and more particularly to connections between users across multiple online social network services.
Online social networking services, such as FaceBook®, MySpace®, Last.Fm®, LinkedIn®, and the like, are web sites that allow users to create online representations of themselves and establish ties, e.g., connections, with other users. The term “user” is used herein to refer to the representation of a person (or organization) in a social network as well as to a person who uses the social network, e.g., by accessing a web site via a client computer. The connections between users may represent friendship, kinship, business connections, values, dislike, or any other type of relationship.
A social network may be represented graphically, with nodes corresponding to users and vertices (e.g., links) between nodes representing connections. The data and data relationship embodied by such graphical representation may be stored in a memory of a computer system such as a web server. The computer system updates the data and data relationship as new users and connections are added or deleted, and queries the information to find users and their connections in response to requests from users of the social network.
Social networking services display information about users (such as the friends or connections of each user), detailed information that users have provided about themselves, and information about subject matter on which a particular social network focuses (such as schools on FaceBook, media on MySpace, music on Last.fm, and business organizations on LinkedIn). A user's list of friends or connections may be publicly available, but more detailed personal information may be restricted, e.g., accessible only by the user's friends. The social network features may be related specifically to the primary purpose or content of a web site. For example, a music-oriented web site may provide social networking features to allow users to establish connections with other users having similar interests in music. Because social network services are numerous and diverse, a person may be a user of several such services. The services ordinarily identify users by user names that are unique on that service. A person may have different user names on different services, with each user name corresponding to a login account on the corresponding service. Therefore, users of multiple services ordinarily enter their information and create their connections separately on each service. Such efforts are time-consuming and the resulting social networks are fragmented across the different services. Looking up a particular friend, for example, entails remembering or looking up a record of, or searching for a particular social network of which the friend is a member, even if the user is connected to the friend on one or more social networks.
A standardized specification for user login data, called OpenID, has been developed, which allows users to access multiple online services using the same login data, e.g., the same username and password. Although OpenID may be used as a basis for sharing information across online services, developing a broad-based social network based on OpenID would be difficult. It would be desirable, therefore, to allow users to access and share information about their existing social networks across different social network services.